And Begin Again
by Sigridhr
Summary: There's Darcy, and then there's his Darcy. The one he sees when she thinks no-one's looking.


**Title**: And Begin Again  
**Written For**: Lena7623  
**Rating**: R  
**Pairing**: Darcy/Loki  
**Summary**: There's Darcy, and then there's _his_ Darcy. The one he sees when she thinks no-one's looking.  
**Notes**: I am indebted to acadecian for her beta skills, endless encouragement and friendship. This was written for the Going On Facebook exchange on LiveJournal.

* * *

_"Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it."_  
– Mason Cooley

...

The first time Loki sees Darcy, he doesn't even register her presence. He's too busy dealing with all the sensitive protocol and formal, diplomatic apologies involved in fulfilling the All Father's command to assist in repairing the damage done to Earth as payment for his crimes. He can feel the overbearing, and irritatingly constant presence of Thor at his side, and his skin practically itches with frustration as he offers ceremonial, stilted apologies to a sea of glowering mortals.

She's standing at the back, shifting from foot to foot nervously. His gaze skips right over her as he zeroes in on the woman standing beside her: Thor's paramour.

He sneers.

…

He runs into her several times after that. She's always hanging around Jane, and, as much as Loki would like to avoid the plain-faced mortal woman Thor seemed prepared to move heaven and Earth for (mostly because the prospect of Thor moving heaven and Earth for a mortal woman was utterly _sickening_ to watch), Thor sticks to his side like glue, and Jane seems to stick to Thor's side, and Darcy to Jane's until they're one long trail of people behaving constantly like they're forced to share each other's company and aren't enjoying it very much.

Which is true.

When Thor is uncomfortable he simply starts talking louder. So, he talks loudly at breakfast. He talks loudly in the lab, while Jane asks Loki questions about the Bifrost and then glares at him suspiciously like she doesn't believe his answers. He talks loudly as he follows Loki through the streets clearing away rubble. He talks loudly long past the point of having anything to say. And beneath it all is a pleading undertone, begging Loki to behave and get along with his mortal friends. A childish, petulant desire to have things be the way they were.

Thor is unbearable, and Jane equally so. She's full of righteous indignation over his attacks against Thor – some of it warranted, some of it less so.

Slowly, slowly, his attention shifts to the quietest member of their miserable group. And for some reason it stays there.

Darcy is _fascinating_.

There's something knowing in the curve of her lips, like she's in on a joke that no one else is getting. She's young – so very, very young – and it practically _sparkles_. Her moods change faster than the weather: frustratedly shouting about something one moment, teasing Thor the next. She's the single most vexing, incomprehensible person he's ever met, and he's met more than his fair share of vexing people.

There's something about the way she sits, the midsummer sun turning her dark hair a burnished bronze, with her tongue out as she transcribes notes, that seems to rush right into his lungs and pull all the breath out of him. She's young, and it's a young sort of infatuation he has with her – the like of which he's not felt in centuries.

…

She almost never speaks to him.

She speaks to Thor and Jane freely, and, though she doesn't treat him to the same open emnity that Jane does, she never goes out of her way to interact with him either.

In a sense it doesn't matter. There's Darcy, and then there's _his_ Darcy. The one he sees when she thinks no-one's looking. The Darcy whose eyes sparkle with suppressed laughter as she watches Jane and Thor bicker good-naturedly, who pleads with her computer when it isn't working right, whose expressive face twists into ludicrous shapes when Thor says something she finds ridiculous (this happens a lot, to Loki's great pleasure).

This Darcy breathes life into quiet spaces. He sees the soft line of her shoulder, pale and bared as she brushes her hair away from her neck, between the sounds of percolating coffee in the lab. He sees the curve of her smile, the wrinkling of her nose, fill the small spaces between words. He watches her fingers trace over the pages of Jane's notebook, holding it steady as she copies it, spread wide like a stretching cat in the lazy mid-afternoon lull.

But mostly he sees her in the quiet twilight hours. It's hazy at first, all soft sheets and silhouettes – the curve of her shoulder, her hips. He catches glimpses of her hair, curled and gleaming caramel-coloured in the light, in the quiet pauses between each breath. He sees the movement of her fingers, flying across the keys as she types, the way she licks her index finger before turning a page, and they seem to dance in time with the soft humming of the electric lights. Then they begin to dance across his skin.

There's something about her youth that captivates him. He wants to treat her gently, to take her into his arms and press soft kisses to that soft bare skin of her shoulder, to each of her fingers, to her lips.

He pictures her as being timid, soft and pliant. He wants to _teach_ her, to fill up all those quiet places with soft sighs and moans. He wants to take her breath away the way she does his.

When he imagines sex with Darcy it's always slow and gentle, as he calms her nerves with whispered words and light touches. He imagines taking her for the first time, and holding her to his chest in the afterglow. He imagines tracing his fingers across her cheek as she looks up at him trustingly.

…

Sex with Darcy is not slow and gentle at all. It's all fast, and full of rough edges and laughter, and it fills up all the space in the room with sound, smell and sensation.

She looks down at him, straddling his waist, his shirt still hanging by the cuff off one of his arms, and giggles, trailing her fingers down his cheeks silently asking for his trust and his permission. He looks up at her trustingly, and she grins – something knowing in the curve of her lip – before crawling down his body and taking him into her mouth so fast and hot he gasps and arches upward.

But that all comes much later.

…

It is a bit like a switch flipping. But at the same time it's quite gradual. But to Loki, Darcy is nothing if not contradictory, so he doesn't challenge this paradoxical interpretation of events.

It starts with a cup of coffee.

Darcy is the self-dubbed Queen of the Coffee Machine because, to wit, 'Jane puts so much damn sugar in you can stand the spoon straight up, and Thor seems to think just because he likes it black _everyone_ else does. Apparently I'm the only one who can grasp the complicated concept of making different coffee for different people.' She has a routine: coffee with a more-than-generous helping of sugar for Jane, black for Thor, and half-coffee half-hot chocolate for herself. It never varies.

Except, on a rainy Thursday morning in mid-September, she makes an extra cup of black for him and slides it noisily across the counter.

"If you want cream and sugar you'll have to figure it out yourself. And touching my hot chocolate powder is punishable by death. So is touching the coffee machine." She pauses for a moment, considering. "Actually, don't touch anything except the sugar. And wash your mug when you're done."

The coffee is bitter and hot enough to burn his tongue, but he drinks it all anyway and scrubs the mug in the sink until the ceramic is no longer stained.

The next morning, she makes him another one.

…

From coffee comes conversation. He tries putting cream and sugar in his coffee – methodically testing varying quantities of one and the other until he decides on a combination he finds drinkable. She watches the whole thing, and he imagines he can hear her laughing in the sound of his spoon clinking against the side of the mug.

She starts including him in questions. She's going to grab a snack from the canteen, would he like something? How was his weekend? Was it necessary to answer every single question with 'it works because of magic, you foolish mortal', and could he possibly be any more obnoxious?

He answers 'no' to the last one, sounding as confused and off-kilter as he feels. She laughs, throwing her head back and her arms up, and he smiles reflexively.

He runs into her for the first time outside of the lab some weeks later. He's repairing the damage to one of the city's buildings, weaving elaborate spells that had the bricks pull themselves up and rebuild the wall as he watches. She comes out of a Starbucks across the street and pauses, looking at him for a long moment before coming over.

"Can you do that to my living room?" she asks, without preamble.

"Was it damaged in the attack?" He's surprisingly alarmed at the thought of having destroyed her home, however inadvertently.

"Not officially," she says. "But it sure as fuck looks like it. I sort of lost the will to clean when everything went down. Spent more time at work than at home anyway, so I didn't really see the point."

"Thor was overly fond of that excuse growing up," Loki replies. "I first used this spell to enchant all of his belongings and return them to their cupboards. It worked well – at least, until the enchantment on a particular pair of drawers became unduly exuberant and it attempted to strangle Thor. We had to lock it in the wardrobe, and it kept rattling and thumping around in there for a week."

Darcy stares at him for a very long moment. "On second thought, I think I'll just clean it myself," she says.

Loki gives a half shrug, a considerable amount of his focus required for repairing the building.

"Just so I know," she says, casually, "on a scale of accidentally farting in public to being discovered by your parents taking part in a large orgy in the bushes, precisely how embarrassed is Thor by having been nearly killed by a murderous pair of underwear?"

"Being discovered by your parents taking part in a large orgy in the bushes, consisting of yourself, three dogs and a rhinoceros," says Loki.

Darcy cackles in delight.

…

The next shift comes like an earthquake, sudden and groundbreaking. There's an attack on SHIELD, and before he's had much of a chance to think about it, he's running down the hall, Jane and Darcy trailing behind him. He throws a knife with deadly accuracy at one of the robots penetrating the base and it falls to the floor, twitching.

He looks back, and Darcy's staring at him, wide-eyed and terrified, and he feels the sudden, wild urge to pull her into his arms. Instead, he shoves her into a cupboard and turns around to face the robots.

He pulls her out afterwards, and she's so furious she's red in the face as she swears, kicking and screaming, at him. Jane runs off to find Thor, and, probably, to get away from Darcy's obscenity-filled diatribe.

And suddenly, he simply can't help it. He steps forwards and presses his lips to hers.

She's not at all pliant. She's furious, and she bites his lip hard enough that he pulls back.

"Don't you ever, _ever_ lock me in a cupboard again or I will murder you with my bare hands, are we _understood_?" she says.

He nods, about to apologise, when she pulls him down into a searing kiss.

…

Sex with Darcy is not slow and gentle at all.

He's not sure how they made it, stumbling and frantic, into the room he'd been given on base. He doesn't really care either because Darcy's pulling off his clothes haphazardly and utterly inefficiently and his fingers are in her hair.

He tries to be gentle, but she just pushes him down onto the bed, climbing over him with a sureness that speaks of experience.

It's clumsy at first, as they get to know one another. His clothes are still hanging off him, and she can't get the button on his cuff undone so she just tugs at it until it breaks. Her shirt gets caught on her earing, and she laughs, her arms sticking up over her head and waving about like some kind of absurd, giggling seaweed.

She rolls the condom on him, and he tries to go slow as she goes fast, and they wind up horribly mis-coordinating. She just laughs, rolling over onto her back and prodding him with her feet until he does what she wants him to. She takes him in her hand, and guides him towards her, canting her hips up.

"Relax," she says. "It's alright."

But it's not. It's all wrong really. Everything is backwards.

…

As the sweat is cooling on their skin later he holds her in his arms. She squirms away from him, swatting sleepily at him before taking his hand in hers and holding it gently.

"Go to sleep," she says.

But he can't. Darcy still fills the silence – but it's not his Darcy. This Darcy doesn't follow his lead, doesn't need gentle reassurance. There's something different about the bare curve of her shoulder now, the way her hair falls over her face, the swell of her breast – there's something sultry about it, rather than innocent.

He wonders how many men have seen this Darcy before.

…

She's gone in the morning, but he sees her in the lab later that day and she still slides a cup of coffee across the bench to him with a smile. It's fixed just the way he likes it: two spoons of sugar and just a dash of cream.

Later that night she turns up in his room, and walks in like she owns the place. She only stops at the look on his face, and she frowns.

"Should I go?" she asks.

"No," he says. _Yes_, he thinks.

…

She's daring and utterly unselfconscious in bed, with a hedonistic, sensual nature that makes his toes curl. It is sweet, and she's still young, but there is experience written in the touch of her fingers and the swirl of her tongue.

He'd wanted to write himself upon her. To be her teacher, confidante and guide. He wanted to be the first for her, and instead it feels like she's rewriting him.

It slips out accidentally, his tongue unguarded in the afterglow, and she goes quiet and eerily still beside him.

"Is it a problem?" she asks. "That I've slept with other men before?" she adds, when he says nothing.

"No," he says.

She frowns, and there's a long, uncomfortable silence. She's laying rigidly beside him, like she can't decide whether to lie down or get up.

"How many?" he asks, and he regrets it almost instantly.

"Fifteen," she says. "Maybe twenty. I was not particularly picky as a freshman in college."

His sharp intake of breath says everything she needs to know.

"I see," she says, coldly, and she starts climbing out of bed and pulling clothes on.

"Wait..."

"I don't know what you were expecting of me," she says. "But I'm not going to apologise. Get back to me when you figure out what you want."

…

Having was not so great a thing as wanting, it seemed. And now he had neither. There was a pressing, insistent absence to his life in all the spaces Darcy had left behind.

…

"I'm sorry," he says.

It's been precisely twenty days (he's counted), and they're walking outside the in the rain as Darcy makes her way towards the nearest Subway stop. She doesn't slow down.

"What for?" she asks.

He isn't sure.

"Apologise again when you've figured it out," she says, and she skips down the steps into the subway, folding her umbrella as she goes.

He keeps walking.

…

Darcy fills the silent spaces with more silence, and it rings in his head until he absolutely can't bear it anymore.

…

"I want _you_," he says, and it comes out in a broken rush that almost leaves him sagging. She seems taken aback (which isn't surprising, given it's 8.30am on a Monday and she hasn't even had coffee yet, but he didn't exactly _plan_ this).

"You asked me to figure out what I want. I want _you_," he says. "I've been an idiot, because I didn't realise what I had when I did, but if you'll permit me, I would very much like to start again."

"How many?" she asks, and he frowns in confusion. "How many people have you slept with?" she clarifies.

He swallows. "I can't remember," he says. "Fifty perhaps? Our friends and I used to visit Earth... That was a long time ago."

"What does that make you?" she asks.

He stares at her uncomprehendingly.

"Precisely," she says, and she passes him a cup of coffee. And it begins again.


End file.
